The Fisher King (1)

Wrong in the beginning, wrong in the middle, wrong in the end: god in the beginning, man in the middle, dog in the end: beginning over, dong in her middle, god in the end: Such rondos prescribe our endless cycles through what’s essential, building on and nesting in our heart of hearts, that garden inside the garden where all creation begins and ends.

Carl Kerenyi: “‘Origin’ means two things in mythology. As the content of a story or mythology it is the ‘giving of grounds’ (Begundung): as the content of an act it is the ‘founding’ (Gundung) of a city or the world. In either case, it means man’s return to his own origins and consequently the emergence of something original, so far as accessible to him, in the form of primordial images, mythologems, ceremonies. (“Prolegomena” in Essays on a Science of Mythology)

So the myths locate a circle of origin, and then proceed to build “something original,” which here means something soaked in first sources yet wholly new. Ah, the fructive backward glance.

We need the origin stories, though our need for them changes over time; thus they are impermeable in one sense and utterly fructive in another, literal in the sense that the narrative is fixed (our history) but the reading ever changes.

Our Judeo-Christian myth begins with Genesis, the original ground, creating the world in six days and on the seventh crowning creation with a garden called Eden in which our primal drama, the parentage of every human knowledge and passion and error, is enacted. Our fall taught us of the ways of man and God.

Yet the readings of this story from the margins -- the gnostic account, the babbling of Oran up from the grave and a three-night soaking of the ancient pagan sea of Manannan -- would turn the tale upside down. “When gnostic and orthodox Christians disagreed, each reach back to the Scriptures they revered in common, and each claimed the Scripture’s support, writes Eileen Pagels in Adam, Even, and The Serpent. “But gnostic and orthodox Christians read the same Scriptures in radically different ways; to borrow the words of ... William Blake, “Both read the Bible every day and night; but you read black where I read white!”

She continues:

(Gnostic interpreters of the story of Adam and Eve contended) that (it) was never meant to be taken literally but should be understood as spiritual allegory -- not so much history with a moral as myth with meaning. Those gnostics took each line of the Scriptures as an enigma, a riddle pointing to deep meaning. Read this way, the text became a shimmering surface of symbols, inviting the spiritually adventurous to explore its hidden depths, to draw upon their own inner experience -- what artists call the creative imagination -- to interpret the story. Irenaeus describes various gnostic interpretations of the creation story and then complains the “while they claim such things as these concerning the creation, every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for, among them, no one is considered mature [or “initiated’] who does not develop some enormous fictions.” Consequently, gnostic Christians neither sought nor found any consensus concerning what the story means but regarded Genesis 1-3 rather like a fugal melody upon which they continually improve new variations, all of which, Bishop Irenaeus said, were “full of blasphemy.” (64)

So the fabulator, my gnostic gnomon Oran, adventure of the dreaming mind, questor for sources, delver in origins, profanation in the midst of fundamentals, sings on in his skull-boat, merrily, bawdily, embodied in water, his song unquiet, ever-changing, bridging every shore I’ve reached with one incessant bliss.

***


THE FISHER KING

October 13, 2005

That’s me on a bier of sand,
prone to every crashing wave
to wound and womb a man.
How many years now has
it been since I blundered
on this charmed and brutal
beach? I still feel a piercing
jolt far down recalling
the sight of her emerging
from that summer’s
bossa nova sea like an
epiphany of dooms, her eyes
so dangerously blue,
her breasts startling
a wave’s cerulean wild foam.
She took me by the hand
and laid me down where
surf exhausts on sand
in spread and plunging sighs,
the lance I struck in her
returned by her every kiss.
Throughout she never said a
word though I implored her
name and land, her silence
looming great and greater
amid each booming wave.
I came; I swooned; I slept
beneath the dead: And when
I woke the next bright day
she was gone for good.
But I was jailed forever there,
nailed to that beach through
a crowning wound of bliss.
I thus became the lord of every
beach where love its lovers fold and crash,
my tears the wasteland
salting every kiss.
I rule the part of every wave
which ebbs with an aching hiss,
my domain the wetter half of seas,
the darker taste of lees.
For years I’ve lain and dreamt
of loves both great and small,
combing beds and biers for
one pure and wild and blue enough
derange to cure this wounded thrall.
Though I’m struck and still
my mind enquires without rest
for a love so of the sea as to
cure its rude infinity,
a balm for severed loins
by whatever they forsook me for
that night of nights so long ago.
What were the words that
woman never said, holding
a finger to her lips as she
faded from my shore
into a drowning wave?
Those words I seek
are hidden deep inside
this ancient sexual gouge,
tossed like a chalice down
a well which none may sip
but that immortal child we
spawned that night who
one day will wash ashore
here and in my brow,
astride that wave or the next.
I lie; I wait; I comb the swells
amid an endless summer breeze.
I chaff the blue for one jot of fire
to delve me from her knees,
healed at last of what hath
made me dream of wholes.